Microsoft Sponsoring TidBITS -- We'd like to welcome our latest sponsor, a small company that a few of you might have heard of before - Microsoft Corporation. In fact, we're being sponsored by Microsoft's Macintosh teams, the groups responsible for the Mac versions of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Office 98. We recently visited the Internet Explorer/Outlook Express team in San Jose and were astonished to realize how many people there we knew from their previous jobs. It was an impressive collection of Macintosh programmers, with folks who had worked at companies like Aladdin, Apple, Claris, Metrowerks, Natural Intelligence, and ResNova. A number of these programmers continue to produce well-known shareware programs and were responsible for some of the earliest Macintosh Internet software. We asked a friend there (who used information from an early issue of TidBITS to help land his first job in the industry many years ago) why he had decided to join Microsoft. His reply was that he wanted to help create great Macintosh programs that would be used by the largest number of people, and Microsoft offered the best opportunity to do that. Whatever the reasons, it's great to see Microsoft putting so much emphasis on Macintosh software and the Macintosh Internet community. [ACE]